Girls as Elite Distinction - Appropriation and Ownership of Bodily Capital

Girls as Elite Distinction: Appropriation and Ownership of Bodily Capital Abstract The capital concept has proliferated in studies of culture and stratification, usually depicting individual assets as personal advantages within given fields. Because this approach sidesteps issues of ownership, it obscures how unequal value can be generated through the appropriation of someone else’s capital. Based on fieldwork in the VIP party circuit from New York to Cannes, as well as 84 interviews with party organizers and guests, I document the uses of women’s bodily capital by men who appropriate women as a symbolic resource to generate profit, status, and social ties in an exclusive circuit of businessmen. I argue that women are unable to capitalize on their bodily capital as effectively through participation in the VIP scene because symbolic boundaries penalize women for strategic intimacy. By shifting the analysis of capital from individual advantages to systemic extra-individual advantages, this article brings appropriation into the study of culture and class. Further, this article genders the elite by documenting the cultural contradictions of femininity and power in elite men’s social spaces. Introduction 2 Since the expansion of human capital to account for the cultural foundations of class inequality (Bourdieu 1986), new concepts of cultural capital have proliferated. Some are in response to changes in the world, like changing class structure and hence, emergent cultural capitals (Prieur and Savage 2013), while others are efforts to understand specific fields, like sexual capital (Martin and George 2006), and the role of the body in carrying capitals, from aesthetic (Anderson et al. 2010), bodily (Wacquant 1995), and physical capital (Shilling 1993). Marx’s old concern with capital accumulation centered on owners and the unequal extraction of value, yet in sociology’s “accumulation of capitals,” there is a relative absence of attention to appropriation and ownership (Neveu 2013). To whom does the value of all of these capitals go? This article revisits the problem of ownership in the case of women’s “embodied cultural capital” (Bourdieu 1984). Building on feminist revisions of capital and its conversions (McCall 1992; Skeggs 2004), I examine the uses of women’s bodily capital and the differential value it generates for men and for women. If, as Randall Collins has posited (1992), women are to status as men are to class, what are the signifiers and types of value that women afford, and why does their value accrue disproportionately to men? I present ethnographic data on the circulation of women with highly valued bodily capital, called “girls,” in the global circuit of VIP parties catering to the new global elite. A modern social and representational category, “the girl” signifies the contested status of young women who lie outside childhood and outside social codes and conventions of adulthood relating to gender, marriage, sexuality, and motherhood (Weinbaum et al. 2008). I show how men and women unequally profit from women’s embodied symbolic 3 value, or girl capital for short, which men use to generate status and social connections in an exclusive circuit of businessmen. I document this process by following women throughout the VIP party circuit and its organizers, called party promoters, a class of largely male brokers hired to bring women to VIP destinations. I observe women at parties in New York, the Hamptons, Miami, and the French Riviera over 18 months. Additionally, this article draws from interviews with 20 girls, 44 promoters, and 20 clients (men who spend money in VIP parties). Drawing from men’s interviews, I map the moral distinctions—especially sexual morality (Parrenas 2011)—that men use to evaluate girls and approach interactions with them in the VIP club. I argue that women are unable to capitalize on their bodily capital through participation in the VIP scene precisely because their use of bodily capital aligns them with devalued social identities. By shifting the analysis from capital as an individual resource to the cultural meanings that make capital unequally convertible, this article brings systems of ownership and appropriation into the study of culture and class. In addition, this paper “genders” the elite and documents the cultural contradictions of femininity and power in elite men’s social spaces. THE CAPITAL CONCEPT Embodied Capital as Personal Advantage Since Bourdieu analyzed cultural dispositions as convertible resources, types of cultural capitals have multiplied to show how people navigate through various fields, from the neoliberal city (Centner 2008 on spatial capital) to underground parties (Thornton 1995 on subcultural capital).1 By establishing the conversion value and outcomes of people’s various capitals, sociologists have explicated the cultural 4 mechanisms of class reproduction (e.g. DiMaggio 1982; Rivera 2012). However, these refinements tend to understand the value of cultural capital as a personal resource, because such analyses are concerned with how people or groups of people advance through fields to acquire, for example, neighborhood access (Centner 2008) or social esteem (Thornton 1995). This tendency to focus on individual-level rewards characterizes the conceptual offspring of Bourdieu’s “embodied cultural capital,” those corporeal cues of class written onto the body (Bourdieu 1984, p. 91). Bourdieu noted that looks are not entirely dependent on class trajectories, 1 and to account for the resource of physical appearance, sociologists have developed an array of concepts: bodily capital (Wacquant 1995), physical capital (Shilling 1993), and aesthetic capital (Anderson et al. 2010). Together, these works show how embodied capitals are convertible for individual rewards, like earnings, status, and romantic outcomes (for a review see Hammermesh 2011). For example, Green shows how “sexual capital,” the recognition of being desirable in a given field, orders status in nightlife (2011; see also Hamilton 2007). The conversion rates of bodily capital are gendered, and a school of British feminist scholars argues that femininity itself is a form of cultural capital with wide currency not accessible to men, for instance, in some segments of the labor market like care work (Huppatz 2009; Lovell 2000; Skeggs 1997). Bourdieu is contradictory on this point. Sometimes, class and one’s trajectory through social space determine looks; other times, looks are random accidents of birth (see Martin and George 2006 for a critique). He does note that beauty is valuable to those who possess it, particularly women, especially for occupational profit in the labor market (1984). 1 5 These analyses implicitly frame the primary value of someone’s embodied capital residing with the capital holder herself. An extreme version of this argument is Hakim concept of “erotic capital,” which she argues is women’s collective asset because a biological mandate makes women’s sex appeal more valuable than men’s (2010; for a critique see Green 2013). By keeping the focus on capital as a personal asset with individual consequences, sociologists implicitly shares with neoclassical economists an assumption that self-investment leads to better market outcomes, paradigmatic of human capital theory (Becker 1994). 2 This is explicit in Hakim’s framing of erotic capital, which posits beauty as a currency; she who possesses it gets to “spend” it. Such an approach exemplifies a neoliberal philosophy of the personal imperative for selfinvestment and a disregard to systemic power relations that unequally distribute erotic capital across populations. Moving beyond the personal advantage perspective, we might ask: who, beyond any particular individual, benefits from the value of people’s embodied capital, and why? Gender and the Unequal Value of Embodied Capital Scholars working at the intersection of gender and Bourdieusian theory have begun to chart how gender structures the field of power such that women and men have differential capacities to profit from the value of their own capital (McCall 1992; Skeggs; Lovell 2000; McNay 2000). As “sign-bearing capital,” Skeggs argues, women are a Human capital theory frames capital as an individual investment that is exchangeable on the free market for scarce rewards; by framing wage-earners as miniature capitalists, this approach overlooks how systems of power enable some people to extract unequal amounts of use-value from others (e.g. Karabel and Halsey 1977 p. 307 – 312). 2 gender and class resource that men appropriate (2004 p. 22), a kind of “repository” of 6 capital (McNay 2000, p. 142) that can generate social capital and status for men (Chancer 1998; Lovell 2000). Much literature shows how women’s bodies signify men’s class distinction, as Sombart noted among the capitalist classes of the 18th century (1967 [1922]) see also Veblen 2009 [1899]). Contemporary ethnographies document such processes of distinction in interactional service settings like retail, where workers, particularly women, do “recognition work” to construct high status (Hanser 2008, p. 106; Sherman 2007). Women’s bodies add value to organizations, such that employers seek out particular types of women’s bodies because they signify distinction, for instance tall and svelte women are valuable “feminine capital” in luxury services (Otis 2011). Analyses of sex work likewise document the crucial role of female sexual capital in forging men’s business networks through leisure activities (Hoang forthcoming; Osburg 2013). For example, Allison’s ethnography of Japanese hostess clubs shows how women’s sexual capital is exchanged among men to uphold a system of male-controlled capitalism in Japan (1994). The appropriation of someone else’s embodied capital need not happen via wages. In Greek college life, fraternities gain status from women’s bodily capital, typified by “the blonde” who circulates without pay through frat parties (Hamilton 2007). Similarly, nightclubs amass women’s bodily capital to attract men with money (Grazian 2008; Rivera 2010). Beyond its personal advantages, bodily capital holds value for people and organizations able to harness it, whether by wages or other means. While these literatures richly document the individual and organizational uses of 7 women’s bodies, they rarely explain the unequal extraction of value from embodied cultural capital. Some feminist scholars have suggested that bodily capital is less valuable to women than women’s bodily is to men for structural and cultural reasons. Gayle Rubin’s “political economy of sex” traced the traffic in women as a system of relations in which women are circulated and exchanged among men, who are the main beneficiaries of women as social commerce (1975, p. 174). Women enable social organization through their exchange in kinships, but men control and benefit from the system (Levi-Strauss 1969). Structurally, women hold fewer positions of power and weaker control of economic capital than men. Culturally, feminine beauty and sex appeal are considered incompatible with professional competence and authority (McCall 1992). Women who succeed in cultivating beauty are cultural aligned with a devalued feminine realm. Additionally, women with high stores of valued bodily capital are subject to greater distrust for strategically using their looks to gain what is seen as unfair and unearned advantage (Haltunen 1982). Yet polemical feminist claims that women are “valued possessions in themselves, a source of asserting power between men” (Chancer 1998, p. 261), lack explanation, taking men’s uses of women’s bodies as evidence of ownership, such that female bodies are always already a property of men in a sexist society. The question of process remains: How is capital transformed from a personal asset to one controlled by someone else? Taking the global elite party scene as a case to examine the gendered convertibility and value of bodily capital, I consider the role of women in the VIP and outline the symbolic meanings of women’s bodily capital below. In the VIP, capital 8 transforms from women’s personal asset to one of greater value for men, i.e., from a property of women to women as property. THE CASE: THE VIP CIRCUIT To examine processes of ownership around a form of embodied cultural capital, this article uses the case of women in VIP leisure events for the jet-set elite. The term “jet-set” has origins in the 1950s in reference to global flyers, an era in which commercial flights were prohibitively expensive for most people except the most privileged professionals and tourists. Jet-set is colloquially used to reference highly-mobile persons with class resources; VIP, or “very important people,” is a purchasable status that denotes valued consumers. Sociologists define elites as those with vast class and cultural resources (Khan 2012). Elites belong to the jet-set and the VIP, but not all elites participate in this scene, and many of those who participate are economically insecure. As such, this paper uses the term elite to refer to big spending patrons of clubs—people who have demonstrable economic resources—while the scene is best described as composed of jet-setters and VIPs. Both VIP parties and elites are global, since the world’s wealthiest stratum is today characterized as more international, more mobile and more geographically diverse than its predecessors (Atkinson and Piketty 2007; Khan 2012). These parties appear in nodes in the global circulation of the business class, which follows a transatlantic calendar of VIP events and parties from St. Barts in January, Miami in March to St. 9 Tropez in July, and parallel to the Fashion Week calendars each September and February (FT 2012). In such nodes, VIPs frequent exclusive nightclubs, which offer “bottle service.” Rather than order drinks at the bar, VIP patrons rent tables and purchase whole bottles of alcohol, which come with ice and mixers, at prices ranging from $250 per bottle of Absolut vodka (750 ml which retails for $25) to $5,000 for a magnum-size (1.5 liters) bottle of Cristal champagne (which retails for $750). The average price is $1500 per table on a Saturday night at one exclusive nightclub (Elberse, Barlow and Wong 2009). Big spending clients are called “whales” as in finance and gambling lingo, and clubs showcase their expensive purchases by lighting firework sparklers affixed to the bottles and carried by “bottle girls,” attractive women in revealing clothing, to clients’ tables. Entry to these clubs requires the purchase of bottle service, or is free (“comped”), depending on status determinations made by personnel at the door, which are gendered and class-coded (May and Chaplin 2008; Rivera 2010). The door screening ensures that the bottle service club is an exclusively VIP space. METHODS Ethnography is the best method to observe the interactional processes of capital conversions, and interviews are ideal for capturing the differential field of meanings around these capital conversions. I gained access to VIP clubs from previous fieldwork in the fashion modeling industry, which has substantial ties to nightclubs and specifically, to party promoters. In my earlier fieldwork, promoters invited me to their parties free of 10 charge with dinner included; to begin this project, I accepted their invitations and began going out with them. Over the course of 18 months in New York, I attended 17 clubs and went out with promoters on over 100 nights, in addition to taking four trips to VIP destinations. I interviewed a total of 44 promoters (all of them working in New York); of those, seven are transitioning or have already become owners or managers of clubs or restaurants. Interviews were recorded and sometimes lasted over the course of several days as extended conversations. Of the 44 promoters interviewed, I accompanied all but eight of them to their parties at least once and as much as 10 times, and sometimes I visited three or four clubs over the course of one night, which generally began with dinner at 10 p.m. and ended between 3 – 4 a.m., with occasional after-parties stretching beyond 8 a.m. the next day. Methodologically I followed Kusenbach’s go-along ethnographic method, a hybrid of interviewing and participant observation by following promoters on their daily and nightly rounds to trace the social architecture of elite nightlife (2003). Daytime observations proved as important as nighttime encounters, as one promoter told me: “There can be no night without the day,” albeit the promoter’s day rarely begins before 11 a.m. and often as late as 2 p.m. when he wakes up. Promoters generally welcomed my presence, since their job is chiefly in getting women to hang out. In exchange for promoters’ participation, I dressed the part and went out with them at night; thus through my own bodily capital I was able to maneuver the problem of ethnographic access in studying up (Gusterson 1997). Reflecting the demographics of promoters, my sample is majority men and 11 includes five women. Half of the 44 promoters interviewed are immigrants (n=22). Most of them speak multiple languages and can converse with international clients and models. Out of the 44 promoters interviewed in New York, just eight of them are white Americans. I also accepted invitations to VIP destinations on four occasions: five nights in Miami (March), two separate weekends in the Hamptons (June), and one week in Cannes (July), with most expenses paid by promoters, clubs, and VIP clients. Two trips, to Miami and Cannes, were with a promoter named Santos, who I met at a club in New York. After explaining my research, interviewing him, going out with him, and several text conversations later, Santos invited me to attend his parties in Miami over the month of March, during the Electronic Music Festival which draws music industry personnel, and as I discovered, also clients, promoters, and models from around the world. I paid for my own flight to Miami and stayed for free with four young women in the accommodations Santos arranged for all of us together, in the guesthouse of a villa on Star Island, rented by a group of Californian mortgage bankers (who paid $50,000 for the weekend rental). A year later, I met up with Santos in Europe, first in Milan for a night out at a nightclub where he promotes, and next I followed him to Cannes for a week, staying in his rental villa with eight other women. Finally, I visited the Hamptons on two weekend trips during the summer season. The first time was with a promoter named Sampson who I met on the street in Soho with one of Santos’ associates. The following summer I took at second trip without 12 promoters, when a client invited me to his shared 9-bedroom mansion for a weekend to join a ten other women guests. Copious amounts of alcohol and sometimes drugs are supplied to women free of charge; I generally held a glass of champagne during the parties but refrained from drinking more than occasional sips, enough to fit in. Taking notes proved easy, as everyone is constantly tapping on their phones, especially promoters, even as they dance inside clubs. I interviewed a sample of 20 women and 20 clients in New York. As it was impossible to secure lists of clients or women from either the nightclubs or the promoters, I built non-probabilistic samples composed of participants I recruited in three different ways: through face-to-face meetings at dinners and parties; through promoters; and through snowball sampling. I recruited women primarily from the tables. Each night out I habitually introduced myself to each woman at the table to find out how she met the promoter we accompanied. At this point in our conversation, I typically would explain my role as a writer working on a project about nightlife. Interviews with women focused on their relationships with promoters and clients and their careers in the scene. Among the 20 women interviewed, their median age is 23. At 31-32, I was regularly the oldest woman at promoters’ tables but still welcome because I look younger. Clients were the most difficult to approach for interviews. I might be one of twodozen women in the presence of clients at parties, and few opportunities arose inside clubs in which I might speak with them about my research, given the loud music. If clients attended pre-party dinners, I was able to explain my research, and on quieter nights in clubs I could seize on moments to explain my work and request interviews. Therefore I primarily relied on snowball sampling and recommendations through 13 promoters to interview clients, focusing the interview on their party careers and motivations, and their relationships forged in nightclubs. I coded interview transcripts and field notes using the software Nvivo with a coding scheme that emerged inductively in accordance with the analytical strategy of grounded theory (Charmaz 2001). I have replaced all names with pseudonyms and removed potentially identifying information. FINDINGS GIRLS AS ELITE DISTINCTION A party becomes VIP if it is relatively more exclusive and harder to access, as scarcity lends higher status (Bourdieu 1986). All respondents identified between 10 – 12 nightclubs in NYC as places for socializing with the global VIP. Respondents were immediately able to say which among these were the “hottest” clubs at the moment, socalled “A-List” clubs as opposed to “B- and C-List,” citing the quality of a club’s crowd. A quality crowd with more “very important people” than others will exhibit visible cues of wealth and status: bottles with sparklers and beautiful women. Bottles are purchased by clients, almost always men, the most prized being “whales.” In my own research, whales have paid $200,000 for parades of hundreds of sparkler-lit bottles of champagne brought to their table (known as a “bottle train”). Also highly prized are celebrities, who may or may not pay for their drinks but are valuable for their symbolic capital. Clubs also value affluent businessmen like Wall Street workers and affluent tourists, who spend in regular and smaller amounts of $1,000 – 2,000 a 14 night. At the bottom of male patrons are “fillers,” men who buy drinks at the bar but have some cultural capital, which keeps the club from looking empty. One estimate suggests as much as 80% of the club’s profits come from bottle service customers, though they account for only 40% of the club’s customers (Elberse, Barlow and Wong 2009). Below fillers, male patrons with low cultural capital are described as “bridge and tunnel,” so-called because they are not recognized as Manhattan dwellers, and may be barred entry even if they offer to buy bottle service. To attract whales, clubs use women as bait. Consistent with past research on nightlife, promoters explained that clubs like to have more women than men (Rivera 2010). By my count clubs averaged about 3:2 women to men and sometimes as high as 3:1. Women are consider to be both safer, with lower likelihoods of fights, and more appealing to be around since they constitute what Goffman termed “chance,” a driver of social interaction in entertainment venues that makes the space more exciting for male patrons (1967). However, the quantity of women does not alone suffice to distinguish the VIP space. A club needs a high quantity of so-called “quality” women, measured along a clear hierarchy defined exclusively by her beauty. Exploiting the correlation between attractiveness and status (Webster and Driskell 1983), clubs and their promoters target women whose bodies correspond to those valued in the high-fashion arena as models. Such women are ubiquitously called “girls,” a term which signifies a distinct social category (Weinbaum et al. 2008). 3 In the VIP scene, girls are young (roughly 16 – 25), The term “girl” came into popular usage in England in the 1880s to describe working-class and middleclass unmarried women who occupied a social space between childhood and adulthood. Globally, imagery 3 thin (size 0 – 4), tall (at least 5’9” without heels), and typically though not exclusively 15 white. All promoters described models as inherently valuable for their looks alone, as New York promoter Sampson explained: “When I walk into the club with ten models, it catches your eye.” Super models are at the very top of valuable girls, working or “signed” models with well-known agencies come next, as these girls are understood to be the most physically attractive (i.e., “hot”) as well as “cool,” meaning high in cultural esteem. In this field, the model is embodied symbolic capital; she carries the current status of high fashion to denote a space as elite. 4 The VIP nightlife formula is sometimes called “models and bottles:” Models and bottles everywhere! The crowd is amazing and the space is designed so that I can relax, I can have a conversation with important people or I can go crazy in the club. The door is screened to let in only the best crowd. I won’t go someplace where door isn’t screened and crowd isn’t beautiful. - Dre, 40, Black male from France, promoter for 22 years Because such girls are thought to attract clients, clubs go through elaborate endeavors to ensure they have a high quantity of quality girls. To these ends, clubs hire promoters on a contractual basis to recruit a quality crowd, paying them between $200 and $1,000 per night, depending on the perceived worth of their crowd. In addition, of the girl spread between the 1920s and 1930, such as the “It girl” of American flapper, and she was and continues to be associated with the “frivolous” pursuits of consumption, romance, fashion (Weinbaum et al. 2008, p. 9). 4 Fashion models have been high status symbols since ever since the “supermodel” craze of the 1980s, which exalted the fashion world into entertainment spectacle (Entwistle and Wissinger 2011). promoters receive between 10 – 20% commission from bottle sales when they arrange 16 tables for clients. Girls are typically not paid, but instead offered free dinners in expensive restaurants, free drinks and occasionally also free trips to luxury destinations for parties, all paid for by clubs or promoters. Promoters usually focus their efforts on finding models, recruiting them from Facebook, on the street, at model castings, and through friend networks. Promoters believe models make good guests in nightclubs because of their young ages, flexible schedules and infrequent jobs (especially for newcomers), which allows them to stay out late and often. Models are also globally mobile workers who move about major cities where financial elites also congregate. This creates a homogenized model look throughout the VIP leisure circuit. During fieldwork in the Hamptons, Miami, and Cannes, I saw familiar faces of girls, as well as clients and promoters I knew from New York. Unlike the modeling market, where a woman’s value emerges from her singularity (Mears 2011), in nightlife, girls are valued for their generic equivalencies to exacting physical standards: tall, thin, and young. Many high-fashion models are not conventionally attractive according to dominant tastes, or promoters’ own tastes, Dre explained while we sat at a trendy sidewalk cafe in Soho. I watched Dre eyeing a very thin young woman at a nearby table. She looked like a model. “That’s the kind of girl we are after,” he tells me. “That’s the kind of girl we want with us.” “Why?,” I asked. “Some men might not think that’s attractive.” “It’s true, she’s too skinny,” says Dre. “I like a woman with more curves on her. But to most people, models represent the dream. They represent the elite trendy world, 17 the high-end world of fashion and beauty. They are the dream. I am not attracted to her, but she is my target, if I see her on the street I’ll stop her and talk to her. We need those girls.” As the ubiquitous use of the term “girl” suggests, women’s inclusion in the VIP party is closely tied to youth. The close coupling of youth and women’s value has long been critiqued as an unshakable patriarchal feature of social life from tribal to advanced capitalist societies. The VIP is no exception, but the scene is exceptional in its explicit denigration of older women. For instance, at one dinner party, Dante, a client and regular attendee of jet-set parties summarized: “18-28 is the time for girls. After 28, nobody looks at you.” Another night, at a club in NYC, I spoke with a celebrated musician, himself 40 years old, who sat at a promoter’s table with his 20 year-old blonde girlfriend. Surprised to learn my own age of 32, he offered: It’s because you are brunette. Blondes, they break quite soon. Like Eastern European girls, they are very beautiful but it fades fast. Women in temporary possession of this bodily capital, or “girls,” 5 are treated to free nights out in expensive restaurants and clubs around the world, regardless of their financial means or personal qualities. Physical looks take primacy over girls’ affect or other embodied cues of class such as accent or comportment; given clubs’ low lighting and loud music, personality counts less than immediate bodily cues. Eleanor, who is not a model but approximates the look, explained: 5 When analyzing the production of girl capital, I use the term “girl” to indicate women in the VIP arena, reflecting the logic of the field where women are disempowered in both discourse and practice. It’s all about how you look, how thin you are, how tall you are. It’s all that 18 matters. You could have a horrible personality, and you’ll get into the club if you’re 5’9”. But basically, the promoters will come and find attractive girls, and tell you to bring friends that are attractive, skinny, tall, you know. And they’ll bring you out, and you don’t have to pay for anything. - Eleanor, 22, White American fashion student, from NJ Of course, promoters prefer to host girls who are “fun” and have high energy, but this is hardly a requirement at their tables. Frequently I sat at tables with girls looking bored, tired, or absorbed in their phones, and even on a few occasions falling asleep. Because the field values above all the fashion model, promoters generally treat these girls with great care and attention. When a model named Tasha lost her coat, the promoter Dre spent an hour at the end of the night searching for it, scolding his fellow promoters to be more careful with girls’ belongings. “What’s wrong with [that promoter]? She is a model! She’s an asset to our business. Why would you treat her like that?” After working models, clubs’ next prefer girls who look like they could be models. These are called “good civilians,” as in military terminology designating people who do not belong to the field. Good civilians have the height and slenderness to denote high status, but club workers can spot their slightly inferior bodily capital. A promoter named Jay (29 years-old, African American and a promoter for eight years), explained as we walked down New York’s Spring Street, after his head turned with the passing of a young woman: “She’s hot,” he said casually as we kept walking. “She’s not a model but she’s 19 hot, I’d definitely get with her. That’s what we call a good civilian…. There’s models and there’s good civilians. A good civilian is a girl who fits the description of model but is not really a model. Like she’s not as slim or, you know what I mean, she’s not 5’11,” but she might be 5’8.” She’s just a pretty hot girl, something that the clubs will see and say ‘Ok, she’s pretty hot.’” Near the bottom ranks of acceptably good civilians, girls’ bodies are more likely to be curvaceous with mainstream sex appeal, ethnically non-white, and visibly older than their late-20s. The least valuable are short and overweight women, who are discussed with vitriol as liabilities for the reputations of both clubs and promoters. Explained Mike, a 23-year old white American and promoter for two years: “I will use the term muppets or hobbits to describe the, like, less-than fortunate-looking girls.” Other terms used to describe women who do not conform to fashion standards, and are therefore of low value in the VIP space, are “pedestrian,” “civilian,” and, more derisively, “midget.” Such women are regularly denied entry and screened out by the door personnel, who are under strict instructions to grant entrance only to those female bodies who fit the club’s image of “cool.” One policy at an NYC club prohibits entry of any woman shorter than the 5’7” woman who screens the door. Thus, the “quality” of a club’s crowd comes down to two factors: the wealth of men and the perceived beauty of female guests. The VIP is a space restricted to people with recognizable stores of cultural, social, symbolic, economic capital, and in the case of women, bodily capital.